Digital Business: Speeding Transition to the Cloud

Gartner defines Digital Business as the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds. What does this mean? It means that business demand is out pacing the ability physical IT data centers have to accommodate. Companies are being challenged by competitors using newer technology or startups reinventing how business problems are solved.

Digital Business has changed how business executives think about IT and technology. The ability to innovate quickly and at very low cost is key to being competitive in today’s digital economy – no matter what business, from retail to manufacturing to financial to gaming. Great examples are companies like NetFlix and Instagram, which have changed our culture with their ability to innovate.

I mention these companies specifically because they use the public cloud to create innovation. In the past, companies required huge investment and time to build out data centers for a global presence. Now, with the public cloud like AWS, companies can go from concept to global roll out in months with very little upfront costs.

Digital Business is changing the way companies think about IT. Much of the excitement of public cloud has been focused on small companies that innovate and grow large. But in the past year or so, large enterprise companies have become serious about adopting this same type of innovation. For those of us old enough to know – Enterprise IT hasn’t seen this dramatic of a change since the personal computer changed the mainframe industry.

So why does the public cloud make sense for Digital Business? As you know from our previous post, the cloud enables innovation. First, public cloud is elastic and pay-as-you-use, which enables IT organizations to innovate with very small upfront costs and with the ability to scale globally. Next, public cloud provides a robust platform of services besides just computing, which enables software development teams to focus on business differentiation and to do so much quicker than with traditional IT. Instead of spending time figuring out how to setup a message queue system, developers can use something like the AWS service SQS. Again this speeds up innovation.

In future articles – we will describe in more detail why public cloud is an ideal platform for the new world of Digital Business.